Gambetta and Hertog find that “the share of radical Islamic engineers is no less than nine times greater than the share we could expect if the proneness of engineers to radicalize was the same as that of the male adult population.” (Tyler blogged this paper several years ago.)
Here is the latest bit of evidence:
Mr. Abdulmutallab grew up in a rarefied slice of Nigeria, the son of an affluent banker. He attended one of the West Africa’s best schools, the British School of Lomé in Togo. After high school, he went to Britain and enrolled at the University College London to study engineering.
For more on the privileged life of the Nigerian terrorist read
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/wealthy-quiet-unassuming-the-christmas-day-bomb-suspect-1851090.html
Regarding the NYT article that Alex linked in his post, I’m not surprised that the authors attempt first to downplay the relevance of the information that the US government had on the terrorist (I’d say that the fact that the father denounced the terrorist should have been enough to place him in the list of the 10 most wanted terrorists) and second to downplay the relevance of the possible connection with the American-born iman involved in Hasan’s terrorist attack (I’d like to know how many imans in Yemen would like to attack the US and could do it).
If this guy had succeeded he would have died anyways (along with the other passengers). Now that he failed in his mission – why are we keeping him alive? Why not fulfil his wish of suicide?
@Arnold: I have to admit, this sort of thing bugs me. If you had not been asking rhetorically, you would have thought of several good answers before you had even finished typing the sentence.
Big surprise. The elite everywhere believe they have the duty and right to tell the rest of us how to live, and if we don’t comply they have the right to use coercion to make us comply.
He is only an extreme version of the busybodies on the left and the right we have in the West, who insist that they know best how all of us should live.
The lunatics like Abdulmutallab are just further along the moral superiority continuum than the religious right and the angry left.
They all share a distaste for and aversion to liberty.
After glancing at the study, it seems like most of their conclusions are solid. However in the section looking at over-representation they seem to just look at engineers as percent of total student population, rather than looking at engineers as a percent of “elite” subjects. Earlier in the paper they mentioned that many terrorists came from the high end of the higher education spectrum (medicine, engineering, other sciences) however they neglected to report what percentage engineers make of that elite segment. Based on my time living in the Middle East, I would guess that engineers are nearly as over-represented among the total educational elite as they are among terrorists.
What I can’t figure out is why engineers, of all people, don’t have a gut understanding that you can’t make predictable changes by giving a complex system a hard swat.
Because they are bad engineers?
In general, these men are the scions of wealthy and successful upper or upper middle class families in third world societies. It stand to reason that they would be educated in the sciences or technical disciplines. “No son of mine is going to university and study poetry.”
An innate desire of engineers to tinker, control and adjust things, including society? Could radical Islam and it’s strictures and structures hold appeal to those who like structure and orderliness; particularly the educated from chaotic societies?
Who knows, I think it’s more about the educated and radicalized bourgeoisie from such countries just being more likely to get an engineering education (the ‘no poetry study’ theory).
@stephenSmith,
Yeah, Romanians are evil.
Klingons were bad, but at least you knew where you stood. The Romanians, on the other hand, they were damn scary.
Bin Laden has many wives and children. This qualifies as success with the ladies. Maybe not the same kind of success with women that Hugh Hefner enjoys, but still success.
Engineers are trained to prefer the clear and the certain, and to shun ambiguity and vagueness.
Engineering schools attract the sort of person who already has such characteristics, and strengthen them.
When an engineer hears a scientist say that the universe is between 13 and 14 billion years old, the imprecision of the statement irks him. The Biblical account of God making the universe in exactly six days is more congenial to his cast of mind.
And the Koran’s promise of exactly 72 virgins in paradise (not 71, not 73) is the kind of promise he can consider seriously.
This is a possible explanation for the engineer’s attraction to fundamentalist religion.
I think there’s a common cause here. Many people become engineers because it puts them in control. They build systems and take pride in making them work through acts of will. That means that engineering is attractive to people who don’t feel in control of their lives. And so is terrorism. Some people hate who they are, but can’t take responsibility for it, so they blame their environment. It sounds like Abdulmutallab was a bit of a loser – no real social life, minimal involvement in work, isolated by his social inadequacy and wealth. It was easy for him to blame Western society for making him an outcast, and nurture a hatred for it. He didn’t actually reason out how blowing a plane up would change the world – he just wanted to hurt the object of his hatred, and to show it that he could be in control of his life, at least once.
Most engineering books have hardly any mention of good or bad, right or wrong.
Yeah, there really wasn’t enough moral philospohy in my metallurgy and fluid mechanics books. Gawd.
If I were going recruiting people to build bombs and then actually have them work I wouldn’t head down to the economics department.
If I were a youth who wanted to build bombs I wouldn’t go into economics.
It’s better to be the guy building the bombs than the guy triggering them.
And though we are loathe to admit it, these people do have a point. And, without engineers, you’d hate yourself and your environment as well.
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